My mother was born in Paris but to very provincial Spanish parents. She married my father when she was 23, and he whisked her away to New Jersey to live. Princeton, but still. She had a lot of adjusting to do.
By the time I was born ten years later, you'd think she would have had ample time to acclimate. But, she clung to her old-fashioned, handed- down-by- Spanish -grandmother-ways. She steadfastly refused to succumb to the allure of the Breck Girl... She put lemon juice on my hair to lighten it, olive oil to moisturize it, and vinegar on to detangle it. I went to school smelling like salad.
Lunchtime was equally traumatic. Everyone else had nice, shiny metal lunch boxes bursting with cultural relevancy and advertising. I had a brown paper bag. The over-sized one my mother got from the grocery store. Wrinkled from multiple uses.
I've been making stuffed artichokes with my mom since I was about 6 years old. When my hands were still too small to tackle the prickly, cactus-like leaves of the artichoke, I was in charge of making the stuffing. There was something indescribably satisfying about it: first I wet the stale Italian bread and squished in between my fingers, then I grated lots of cheese and added a slew of black olives (which, by the way, made lovely finger extensions). It gave "playing with your food" a whole new perspective.
Mother's Day is in one week. Are you prepared? Skip the flowers and the gift certificates, and make Mom a beautiful breakfast that she won't forget.
Mother's Day is this Sunday, which means you're either taking Mom out for brunch or making her brunch at home. Last year I provided a week's worth of recipes for Mother's Day brunch and had planned on doing the same this year. I have decided against it.
I think it was Joan Rivers who joked about an epitaph that would suit her: “I’d rather be here than in the kitchen!” Or was her line, “If God wanted women to cook, he would have given them aluminum hands?" Either way, my mother has lived by both of these lines her whole life, well at least for as long as I lived with her as a kid. So imagine my and my sisters’ surprise when one sunny Sunday morning, while in our early and mid-teens, we awoke to a basket of picture-perfect bran muffins. Astounding. 